American writer & computer scientist (1960- )
The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.
JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.
JARON LANIER
"One Half of a Manifesto", The New Humanists: Science at the Edge
A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age.
JARON LANIER
Who Owns the Future?
A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.
JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget
The beauty of HTML was that one-way linking made it very simple to spread because you could put something up and take no responsibility whatsoever. And that creates a society in which people display no responsibility whatsoever. That's the problem.
JARON LANIER
"Jaron Lanier: the digital pioneer who became a web rebel", The Observer, March 16, 2013
If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.
JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.
JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
Information is alienated experience.
JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
A heavenly idea comes up a lot in what might be called Silicon Valley metaphysics. We anticipate immortality through mechanization. A common claim in utopian technology culture is that people--well, perhaps not everyone--will be uploaded into cloud computing servers later in this century, perhaps in a decade or two, to become immortal in Virtual Reality. Or, if we are to remain physical, we will be surrounded by a world animated with robotic technology. We will float from joy to joy, even the poorest among us living like a sybaritic magician. We will not have to call forth what we wish from the world, for we will be so well modeled by statistics in the computing clouds that the dust will know what we want.
JARON LANIER
Who Owns the Future?
If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.
JARON LANIER
"One Half of a Manifesto", The New Humanists: Science at the Edge
Digital technologies are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything--and they're doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth.
JARON LANIER
Who Owns the Future?
I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.
JARON LANIER
"Jaron Lanier: The Internet Destroyed the Middle Class", Salon, May 12, 2013
The whole idea of a job is entirely social construct. The United States was built on slave labor. Those people didn't have jobs, they were just slaves. The idea of a job is that you can participate in a formal economy even if you're not a baron. That there can be, that everybody can participate in the formal economy and the benefit of having everybody participate in the formal economy, there are annoyances with the formal economy because capitalism is really annoying sometimes. But the benefits are really huge, which is you get a middle-class distribution of wealth and clout so the mass of people can outspend the top, and if you don't have that you can't really have democracy. Democracy is destabilized if there isn't a broad distribution of wealth.
JARON LANIER
"Jaron Lanier: The Internet Destroyed the Middle Class", Salon, May 12, 2013
When children are growing up, they face a profound conflict between the internal world of their dreams and imagination, in which everything's possible and fluid, and the practical world in which they have parents, food, and friends, in which they're not alone, and in which they can survive. So as kids grow up, they have to gradually de-emphasize this world of imagination and celebration and emphasize the practical world, unless they're willing to be alone in their insanity and completely dependent on others for survival. Of course it's possible to integrate the two, but it's so hard, like walking a tightrope. I think the reason that kids instinctively love computers, and especially love virtual reality, is that it really does present a new solution, a way to make imaginary worlds that we can be together in, just like the real world.
JARON LANIER
Spin Magazine, November 1995
Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow.
JARON LANIER
"One Half of a Manifesto", The New Humanists: Science at the Edge
But the problem with copying is--well, there are multiple problems. One is that it makes information less valuable because it loses the context. So if you don't know what--like information is only information in context. So there's a way in which copying intrinsically degrades the quality of information. But economically, the problem is very simply that copying severs the link to where the information came from, so it creates this illusion that the information just came from the sky or from angels or sirens or some imaginary place. And that creates this economic falsehood that people didn't really create.
JARON LANIER
"Jaron Lanier: We're Being Enslaved by Free Information", IEEE Spectrum, Jul. 16, 2013
At the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it's a kind of capitalism that's totally self-defeating because it's so narrow. It's a winner-take-all capitalism that's not sustaining.
JARON LANIER
"Jaron Lanier: The Internet Destroyed the Middle Class", Salon, May 12, 2013
Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.
JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
At a minimum if we can just have enough distribution of clout in society so it isn't run by a tiny minority, then at the very least it gives us some room to breathe.
JARON LANIER
"Jaron Lanier: The Internet Destroyed the Middle Class", Salon, May 12, 2013
The problem I have with socialist utopias is there's some kind of committees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that imposes models of outcomes for other people's lives. So in a spiritual sense there's some bit of libertarian in me. But the critical thing for me is moderation. And if you let that go far you do end up with a winner-take-all society that ultimately crushes everybody even worse.
JARON LANIER
"Jaron Lanier: The Internet Destroyed the Middle Class", Salon, May 12, 2013